Tumult of the Mind
by Deastrumquodvicis
Summary: The Doctor and Nyssa battle their own demons when the TARDIS loses power.


"Doctor?" A voice intruded on the Doctor's private thoughts. "Where's Tegan?" "Hmm? Oh, Tegan. I seem to have, well, left her behind."

"Doctor." It was intended as a slight reproach.

"Nyssa. What's done is done. Besides, I'm sure we'll see her again. Just a matter of time." He passed to the other side of the console.

"That's what I was afraid of." "Mm."

"Doctor, can't you go back to Earth and get her?"

"If you like."

"I would."

The Doctor looked a little disappointed. He'd been wanting a break, to just end up on some relaxing planet with golden beaches and clear blue water. Ah, well, perhaps some other time. Changing the coordinates from Telev Three, he flipped switches and dialed dials, and off they went to find Tegan.

"I just hope we get the century right." "What's that?"

"You know how temperamental the TARDIS is. Knowing her, we'll end up in a year in which Tegan hasn't been born yet."

"Or has died."

"Yes, well, let's not think of that, shall we?"

Then the console room went dark.

"Oh, that definitely shouldn't have happened." "What is it?"

"We've travelled through a pocket of Zergheim Space." "What's that?"

"A space that negates very nearly all power systems, with the exception of biological electrics. Unfortunately, that means we're stuck here until either we've drifted out of the pocket or—" He broke off, unhappy with that last possibility. "Mm. Let's try not to entertain that possibility."

Nyssa looked at a little blinking light. "Doctor, there's a light on over here."

"Oh?" The Doctor came over to where Nyssa was. "The life support is still working, thank goodness."

"But you said—"

The Doctor grinned. "Biological circuitry."

A sudden force knocked them across the room, Nyssa hitting her head on the doors and the Doctor whacking his head on the TARDIS console. The latter had a fleeting thought before being knocked out: _Defense screens. Not biologically powered. Mm._

Nyssa was in a lush forest, sunlight streaming down, birds singing, everywhere peace.

"Traken?" Utter astonishment. How could she be on Traken? It had been destroyed! "Nyssa?" A kindly and familiar voice came from behind her. Everything felt so dreamlike, and

yet so real.

"Father!" Nyssa turned, smiling.

"Nyssa, I've been so worried! You've been gone for so long! I was starting to think you'd never come home."

"But—"

"But what, Nyssa?" Tremas's voice became concerned. "Is something wrong?" "The Master! He—"

"Took over my body?"

"Yes! It was all so horrible! Please, father, tell me it was a dream!" She was so desperate for it to be true that this was real, for everything the Master had done was just a terrible nightmare. She wanted to be at home on Traken, wanted everything to be the way it was before the Master had ever come there. She clutched at her father, hugging him in tears.

"No, Nyssa, it was no dream." The voice had lost all soft velveteen kindness and had been replaced with cold sharp cruelty. Nyssa looked up, found the Master staring at her, while she realized that she herself was bound with unbreakable rope. The forests of Traken were plunged into darkness at the same instant Tremas had been replaced. And the Master stood, leering, his eyes laughing with sadistic joy at Nyssa's fear.

Eyes wide, Nyssa saw the wave of flame coming toward her, a firestorm to eradicate all life on Traken—and yet it was dark flames, as though obscured by ash. She screamed as the flames engulfed her…

Rocks? The Doctor looked up into the grey wasteland surrounding him. He'd been here before, but he was disoriented, not recognizing his surroundings. He picked up his hat which had been thrown down beside him, stood up, and fell back down. His blood pressure was extremely high, and his heartbeats were thumping in his ears, further dampening his ability to figure out what was going on.

"Doctor?" A woman with dark hair stood behind him. The Doctor turned to find the woman that was his wife.

"What are you doing here? Furthermore, where is here?" She smiled. "Though you regenerate, you never change."

"Where—" A singing came into his mind, a beautiful woman's voice. The Doctor could tell that the singer was injured by the slight edge to her song.

"Doctor, you need to rest. Your hearts are beating too hard. Come." She beckoned to him. "I—" The singer's pain added to his own. "I'm sorry," the barely-conscious Doctor said to his

wife. Her grey eyes looked at him, full of genuine concern.

"Doctor, what is it? What's wrong?"

"Mirage, I'm so sorry, but I think you're just that." "Doctor, what—?"

"All of this—it isn't real. At least I think so. And neither are you. It breaks my hearts to say it aloud, but I know you to be dead. I held you in my arms as you died beyond hope of regeneration. This time, Mirage, I must not let myself love you." The Doctor sat on the ground as the woman in front of him faded, like a summer breeze is lost after mere minutes.

A single water drop fell upon the dry rocks.

Nyssa looked up, terrified. Somehow she had survived the fires and now stood on a barren, ashen world—the Corpse of Traken. The ropes were gone, as was all sign of the Master. She felt the darkness pressing down on her. She felt sure that there was no way out. But she'd survived the firestorm. How?

It was cold and dark here. No wind blew, as though there was no atmosphere to be blown. The sun brought no warmth; indeed it made the eerie emptiness worse. Nyssa walked for a few minutes, finally coming to the remains of a building. A skeleton lay as though terrified of something. Other bodies were there, half-rotten, half-recognizable.

She heard a noise behind her, and turned. A man stood there, and she recognized him as the Keeper. He opened his mouth to speak, but the only thing to issue forth from his lips was a maggot. Nyssa was appalled as maggots poured out of all the holes in his head; his eyes rotted away, devoured by the larvae; worms gushed from his nose, and the flesh peeled from his skull leaving nothing but the bone and the stench of death. It was as though nature had been sped up in its processing of the dead. Nyssa felt sick.

The Doctor had spent a few minutes grieving for his love as well as acclimatizing his body to this environment. The song that was in the Doctor's mind persisted, the singer still singing her lonely song, still pained by whatever afflicted her. The Doctor's hearts still beat far too hard to be exerting his body, but he knew he had to do something.

He stood, blinking pain away from his eyes as he felt his hearts protesting by forcing pain on him, as though someone were beating his chest with boxing gloves at 170 times a minute. (His pulse, though hard, was normally paced.) He wished he had something to lean on.

Trudging on, he suddenly remembered where he'd seen this landscape before. It was in the APC

Net in the Matrix on Gallifrey. Then, too, he had been fighting for his life, though then it had been his choice to do so. Here it was not.

He wandered the landscape, wondering where he really was (as the Matrix was one of the least likely possibilities). It seemed like hours, or perhaps days, that he spent, no one to talk to, and that in itself made the time pass like eternity. He needed someone to help him work it out—he alone couldn't do it—but there was no one, and nothing, not even a small weed. Just endless rocks and harsh sunlight.

And why was the song so familiar?

Nyssa just wanted to hide. All of this was terrible, really horrible! She just wanted to be back in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Tegan. Where was the Doctor, anyway? She decided she'd look for him. If she found the Doctor, she'd find the TARDIS and a way back to reality. Not on the surface of the planet now, she wandered lava corridors underground, looking for him, but too scared to find a voice to call him with.

Hadn't she been in this open area before? That rock…she decided to turn it over as she didn't have another way to mark the room. She decided she'd take the left passage. Having done that, she went down the passage and came into—

"This room again!"

Okay, so the left passage was out. She took the right one. On the tunnel went, until she came out and saw the rock in the exact position she left it.

"I'm going in circles!" It just didn't make any sort of sense whatsoever. She sat down and drew a vague map in the dust. If the left passage led to the entry passage, and the right one did too, that made it look like a three-chambered heart outline with a tail and a hole in the middle. Hmm. So if she took the passage back out, logically she'd get out of the maze.

But it wasn't so. She was thoroughly lost. No matter which combination of tunnels she went through, she always ended up in that same chamber. Three lefts, a right, and another left, and she was in the same place. Two rights, the center, a left, and center again, and there was the chamber with the funny pointed rock. Center, center, center, center, and…the same room.

"Oh, Doctor, if only you were here!"

The Doctor, having wandered until he was to the point of exhaustion, sat down.

"Well, if all else fails, I could eat my celery." He looked at his lapel and its slightly withered greenery. "No, this really is no time for jokes."

He lay down on the ground to sleep. Almost instantly he felt the refreshing sensation wash over him that comes with sleep. But it wasn't to last. He was aware of a noise and a presence, and, sitting upright, came face-to-face with a strange silver man. He was staring deep into the Doctor's eyes, and in doing so, immobilized the Doctor. The man simply looked at him and the Doctor stood up. The song that had accompanied the Doctor throughout the time he'd been in this rocky terror faded as though muffled. The silver eyes looked hard at the Doctor, who bowed as a marionette might. The Doctor was struggling against this strange sensation which instilled in him an emotion rare to the Time Lord: fear. True, deep, scared-beyond-sense fear. The puppetmaster gave a little flick of the hand and the Doctor began dancing, a victim of what could only be called possession.

The Doctor called upon his entire will to fight off the enemy control, and could gain no ground. He saw himself doing things he would never have done normally; cart wheeling over the rocky ground, reciting nursery rhymes with the enthusiasm of a politician at a rally. The silver man smiled like a demented clown.

In a last, desperate attempt to keep the silver alien from controlling him, he decided to shut down all his conscious systems—he tried to stop his hearts, keep from breathing, and put himself in a trance. None of it worked.

This torment continued for several minutes (hours?) until the silver man ran out of things for the Doctor to do. Now fully exhausted, the Doctor, once released from the power of the silver man, collapsed in sleep almost instantly. The song resumed as if to comfort him.

Nyssa sat down in the rock-chamber, convinced she would never get back to the TARDIS. She started to cry, Traken tears upon the brown rocks. Wracked now with sobs, she considered how long it would take her to die in this little room. Four days, she decided, as dehydration would take its toll first. Four whole days. She had never thought it would take so long to die.

"Doctor! Oh, where are you?"

She curled up against the wall, terrified at the thought of dying, yet despairing of any chance to get out alive. Or dead.

The Doctor awoke after a long rest. The rest, however, had done him little good as he was still nearly as tired as he had been before sleeping. He was hungry, but his meager celery would have to wait until he was truly desperate. There weren't even any jelly babies in his pocket. _Pity,_ he thought_. I_ _could really go for a red one._

"Doctor! Oh, where are you?"

The Doctor sat straight up. Was that Nyssa?

"Doctor!"

"Nyssa! Where are you?" "Please, Doctor, help me!"

The Doctor looked sad. Without knowing where Nyssa was, how could he possibly help? It sounded as though she were everywhere around him, but that didn't make sense.

"I don't want to die, Doctor, please help me!" "Oh, Nyssa…"

Suddenly he realized what the song was. He'd been so tired that he hadn't thought of it. It was the TARDIS's mind calling out to his. It typically only latched on in the subconscious mind of a Time Lord or other telepathic being, but this was different. The Doctor had an idea. He sat down and adopted a meditative position.

Nyssa had kept calling, convinced that she'd heard the Doctor. She suddenly heard a beautiful singing, sort of like a river of song. She also heard the Doctor quite clearly, as though he were right next to her.

"Nyssa, concentrate. Visualize the song as a rope. Grab hold of it. I can bring you home, but only if you grab the end of the rope."

Nyssa closed her eyes and pictured herself grabbing a rope made out of music. She held tightly as she spoke calmly.

"Alright, Doctor, I have the rope. What do you want me to do now?"

"Forget your surroundings, whatever they may be, and hold tightly to the rope." "I'll try."

"Good girl, Nyssa."

Suddenly the cave melted into a calm lake, and she floated gently back toward the source of the rope/song.

The Doctor, too, held the end of a rope of song, and was also being pulled through the waters of peace. He was grateful for his telepathy, and the fact that he could contact Nyssa's mind through whatever separated them.

As he came close to the shore, he caught sight of Nyssa. He smiled warmly as he realized their ordeal was nearly over.

They woke up.

The TARDIS console room was still dark when the two awoke, but the lights came back on in less than ten seconds after their revival.

"Doctor, I don't understand. What happened?"

"I think some sort of telepathic entity that feeds off of fear must live in the Zergheim pockets. We were trapped by it and it played off our fears."

"Like being lost."

"And controlled, yes. The TARDIS knew all along what was going on. That was the song you heard. Typically the symbiosis between a Time Lord and their TARDIS is on a level below the conscious mind, but in this case, since we were unconscious, the TARDIS reached out to try to help."

"And sent us a life buoy." "Yes, exactly."

The two sat in silence for a moment, reflecting on their experience. Nyssa wondered what their fears said about them, and was glad that Tegan hadn't been there to go through it. The Doctor wondered if he would ever see Gallifrey again. He would like very much to spend some time at home.

"I want to rest." Nyssa sounded as tired as the Doctor felt. She turned to leave the console

room.

"Yes, I thought you might." "Doctor?"

"Hmm?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Well, fix the audio input on the scanner." He saw the look on Nyssa's face. "No, perhaps in the morning. Right now I would like a nice cup of tea and a quiet book before bed."

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